Download or read book Stopped Rocking and Other Screenplays written by Tennessee Williams and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 1984 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written at various times over the last twenty-five years but never produced, the four scripts included in Tennessee Williams's Stopped Rocking and Other Screenplays encompass both the realistic style of "the early Williams" (the author's quotes) and the more experimental dramatic devices of many of his "later" plays. Two screenplays from the fifties, All Gaul Is Divided and The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond, remained in the files of Williams's New Orleans apartment until a thorough cleaning uncovered them in the mid-seventies. Thus, All Gaul, an expanded version of the story of a St. Louis teacher's dreams of love told in A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur (1978) actually predates that play. A companion piece in mood and style, The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond lyrically evokes the late twenties debutante society of Memphis and the Delta plantations. Adapted from the graphic short story of the same name, One Arm concerns a young male hustler awaiting execution for murder. Because much of the visual action is combined with a voice-over narration, Williams considered the form of this "film-play" from the late sixties somewhat experimental. In Stopped Rocking (1977), Williams returns to a familiar theme, the institution as the last haven of those who cannot cope with daily conflict and have "resigned from life." He was confident that this play, like so many of his others, would eventually find its audience: "I know that the 'dark' of the work is more than balanced by its humanity, and that this light of humanity will tip the balance favorably, as a natural act of grace."
Download or read book Stopped Rocking and Other Screenplays written by Tennessee Williams and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 1984 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Tennessee Williams died in the winter of 1983 he left among his voluminous papers the texts of four screenplays none of which had been made into or was even being considered for a film at that time.
Download or read book Hollywood s Tennessee written by R. Barton Palmer and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2009-04-01 with total page 373 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No American dramatist has had more plays adapted than Tennessee Williams, and few modern dramatists have witnessed as much controversy during the adaptation process. His Hollywood legacy, captured in such screen adaptations as A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and Suddenly, Last Summer, reflects the sea change in American culture in the mid-twentieth century. Placing this body of work within relevant contexts ranging from gender and sexuality to censorship, modernism, art cinema, and the Southern Renaissance, Hollywood's Tennessee draws on rarely examined archival research to recast Williams's significance. Providing not only cultural context, the authors also bring to light the details of the arduous screenwriting process Williams experienced, with special emphasis on the Production Code Administration--the powerful censorship office that drew high-profile criticism during the 1950s--and Williams's innovative efforts to bend the code. Going well beyond the scripts themselves, Hollywood's Tennessee showcases findings culled from poster and billboard art, pressbooks, and other production and advertising material. The result is a sweeping account of how Williams's adapted plays were crafted, marketed, and received, as well as the lasting implications of this history for commercial filmmakers and their audiences.
Download or read book Law and Sexuality in Tennessee Williams s America written by Jacqueline O’Connor and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2016-05-31 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the diverse representation of sexualities in Tennessee Williams’s texts and argues for his creative response to the increase, prior to and following World War II, in criminal prosecution of transgressive sexual activity. It expands longstanding scholarly assessments of Williams’s work, using the law as a framework to assess this writer’s role as a cultural, political, and legal force participating in the normalization of diverse sexualities, during his lifetime and beyond.
Download or read book Sexual Politics in the Work of Tennessee Williams written by Michael S. D. Hooper and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-04-12 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is Tennessee Williams a social writer at heart? Hooper questions this view, presenting a new interpretation of the dramatist.
Download or read book Baby Doll Tiger Tail A screenplay and play by Tennessee Williams written by Tennessee Williams and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 1991-05-17 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A taut, vivid drama of a voluptuous child-bridge who refuses to consummate her marriage to an older, down-on-his-luck cotton-gin owner. In 1956, Time magazine called Tennessee Williams’ Baby Doll "just possibly the dirtiest American-made motion picture that has ever been legally exhibited." The taut, vivid drama of a voluptuous child-bridge, who refuses to consummate her marriage to an older, down-on-his-luck cotton-gin owner in Tiger Tail County, Mississippi until she is "ready," has gained in humor and pathos over the years as society has caught up with the author’s savagely honest view of bigotry and lust in the rural South. But Tennessee Williams was first and foremost a writer for the stage, and this reissue of his original screenplay for the Elia Kazan movie of Baby Doll is now accompanied by the script of the full-length stage play, Tiger Tail, developed from that screenplay during the ’70s. The text, which incorporates the author’s final revisions, records the play as it was produced at the Hippodrome Theatre Workshop in Gainesville, Florida, in 1979.
Download or read book Critical Companion to Tennessee Williams written by Greta Heintzelman and published by Infobase Publishing. This book was released on 2014-05-14 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the greatest American dramatists of the 20th century, Tennessee Williams is known for his sensitive characterizations, poetic yet realistic writing, ironic humor, and depiction, of harsh realties in human relationship. His work is frequently included in high school and college curricula, and his plays are continually produced. Critical Companion to Tennessee Williams includes entries on all of Williams's major and minor works, including A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Glass Menagerie, a novel, a collection of short stories, two poetry collections, and personal essays; places and events related to his works; major figures in his life; his literary influences; and issues in Williams scholarship and criticism. Appendixes include a complete list of Williams's works; a list of research libraries with significant Williams holdings; and a bibliography of primary and secondary sources.
Download or read book The Luck of Friendship The Letters of Tennessee Williams and James Laughlin written by James Laughlin and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2018-03-13 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The chronicle of Tennessee Williams and James Laughlin’s unlikely yet enduring literary and personal relationship. In December 1942, two guests at a Lincoln Kirstein mixer bonded over their shared love of Hart Crane’s poetry. One of them was James Laughlin, the founder of a small publishing company called New Directions, which he had begun only seven years earlier as a sophomore at Harvard. The other was a young playwright named Thomas Lanier Williams, or "Tennessee," as he had just started to call himself. A little more than a week after that first encounter, Tennessee sent a letter to Jay—as he always addressed Laughlin in writing— expressing a desire to get together for an informal discussion of some of Tennessee’s poetry. "I promise you it would be extremely simple," he wrote, "and we would inevitably part on good terms even if you advised me to devote myself exclusively to the theatre for the rest of my life." So began a deep friendship that would last for forty-one years, through critical acclaim and rejection, commercial success and failure, manic highs, bouts of depression, and serious and not-so-serious liaisons. Williams called Laughlin his "literary conscience," and New Directions serves to this day as Williams’s publisher, not only for The Glass Menagerie and his other celebrated plays but for his highly acclaimed novels, short stories, and volumes of poetry as well. Their story provides a window into the literary history of the mid-twentieth century and reveals the struggles of a great artist, supported in his endeavors by the publisher he considered a true friend.
Download or read book The Glass Menagerie written by Tennessee Williams and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2011 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A beautiful clothbound edition of a beloved classic to celebrate the 100th birthday of America's greatest playwright, with a sweeping new introduction by Pulitzer Prize-winner Tony Kushner.
Download or read book The Traveling Companion and Other Plays written by Tennessee Williams and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2008 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Collected here for the first time, these twelve plays embrace what Time magazine called "the four major concerns of Williams' dramatic imagination: loneliness, love, the violated heart and the valiancy of survival"--Back cover.
Download or read book Blue Song written by Henry I. Schvey and published by University of Missouri Press. This book was released on 2021-06-04 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 2011, the centennial of Tennessee Williams’s birth, events were held around the world honoring America’s greatest playwright. There were festivals, conferences, and exhibitions held in places closely associated with Williams’s life and career—New Orleans held major celebrations, as did New York, Key West, and Provincetown. But absolutely nothing was done to celebrate Williams’s life and extraordinary literary and theatrical career in the place that he lived in longest, and called home longer than any other—St. Louis, Missouri. The question of this paradox lies at the heart of this book, an attempt not so much to correct the record about Williams’s well-chronicled dislike of the city, but rather to reveal how the city was absolutely indispensable to his formation and development both as a person and artist. Unlike the prevailing scholarly narrative that suggests that Williams discovered himself artistically and sexually in the deep South and New Orleans, Blue Song reveals that Williams remained emotionally tethered to St. Louis for a host of reasons for the rest of his life.
Download or read book Southern Writers written by Joseph M. Flora and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2006-06-21 with total page 498 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This new edition of Southern Writers assumes its distinguished predecessor's place as the essential reference on literary artists of the American South. Broadly expanded and thoroughly revised, it boasts 604 entries-nearly double the earlier edition's-written by 264 scholars. For every figure major and minor, from the venerable and canonical to the fresh and innovative, a biographical sketch and chronological list of published works provide comprehensive, concise, up-to-date information. Here in one convenient source are the South's novelists and short story writers, poets and dramatists, memoirists and essayists, journalists, scholars, and biographers from the colonial period to the twenty-first century. What constitutes a "southern writer" is always a matter for debate. Editors Joseph M. Flora and Amber Vogel have used a generous definition that turns on having a significant connection to the region, in either a personal or literary sense. New to this volume are younger writers who have emerged in the quarter century since the dictionary's original publication, as well as older talents previously unknown or unacknowledged. For almost every writer found in the previous edition, a new biography has been commissioned. Drawn from the very best minds on southern literature and covering the full spectrum of its practitioners, Southern Writers is an indispensable reference book for anyone intrigued by the subject.
Download or read book The Theatre of Tennessee Williams written by Tennessee Williams and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 1971 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Volume III of the series includes Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), Orpheus Descending (1957), and Suddenly Last Summer (1958). The first, which won both the Pulitzer Prize and Drama Critics Award, has proved every bit as successful as William's earlier A Streetcar Named Desire. The other two plays, though different in kind, both have something of the quality of Greek tragedy in 20th-century settings, bringing about catharsis through ritual death.
Download or read book The Collected Poems of Tennessee Williams written by Tennessee Williams and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2007-04-17 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: All of the author's previously published poems, including poems from the plays, are in this definitive edition that comes with a CD of the author reading some of his poems in his unmistakable Mississippi drawl. Few writers achieve success in more than one genre, and yet if Tennessee Williams had never written a single play he would still be known as a distinguished poet. The excitement, compassion, lyricism, and humor that epitomize his writing for the theater are all present in his poetry. It was as a young poet that Williams first came to the attention of New Directions’ founder James Laughlin, who initially presented some of Williams’ verse in the New Directions anthology Five Young American Poets 1944 (before he had any reputation as a playwright), and later published the individual volumes of Williams’s poetry, In the Winter of Cities (1956, revised in 1964) and Androgyne, Mon Amour (1977). In this definitive edition, all of the playwright’s collected and uncollected published poems (along with substantial variants), including poems from the plays, have been assembled, accompanied by explanatory notes and an introduction by Tennessee Williams scholars David Roessel and Nicholas Moschovakis. The CD included with this paperbook edition features Tennessee Williams reading, in his delightful and mesmerizing Mississippi voice, several of the whimsical folk poems he called his "Blue Mountain Ballads," poems dedicated to Carson McCullers and to his longtime companion Frank Merlo, as well as his long early poem, "The Summer Belvedere."
Download or read book Tennessee Williams written by George W. Crandell and published by . This book was released on 1995 with total page 714 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This comprehensive collection describes all the published works by one of America's most famous and prolific dramatists. Author of Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and many other dramas presented on both stage and screen, Tennessee Williams was also the writer of short stories, poetry, novels, essays and autobiography.
Download or read book One Arm and Other Stories written by Tennessee Williams and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 1967 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Here are the eleven remarkable stories of Tennessee Williams's first volume of short fiction, originally published in 1948 and reissued as a paperbook in response to an increasingly insistent public demand. It was this book which established Williams as a short story writer of the same stature and interest he had shown as a dramatist. Each story has qualities that make it memorable. In "One Arm" we live through his last hours and memories with a 'rough trade" ex-prizefighter who is awaiting execution for murder. "The Field of Blue Children" explores some of the strange ways of the human heart in love, "Portrait of a Girl in Glass" is a luminous and nostalgic recollection of characters who figure in "The Glass Menagerie," while "Desire and the Black Masseur" is an excursion into the logic of the macabre. "The Yellow Bird," well known through the author's recorded reading of it, which tells of a minister's daughter who found a particularly violent but satisfactory way of expiating a load of inherited puritan guilt, may well become part of American mythology.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Tennessee Williams written by Matthew C. Roudané and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1997-12-11 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a collection of thirteen original essays from a team of leading scholars in the field. In this wide-ranging volume, the contributors cover a healthy sampling of Williams's works, from the early apprenticeship years in the 1930s through to his last play before his death in 1983, Something Cloudy, Something Clear. In addition to essays on such major plays as The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, among others, the contributors also consider selected minor plays, short stories, poems, and biographical concerns. The Companion also features a chapter on selected key productions as well as a bibliographic essay surveying the major critical statements on Williams.
